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A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

newscientist.com

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Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#131

Post by tapoxi »

kakacik wrote: post #39
birdsongs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. ( https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ) What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up. And of course, my original thread of consc…

You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life. I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, dep…

I highly recommend playing Frictonal Games' Soma from 2015. It is an extremely critical examination of this entire concept. Without spoiling the plot, a digitized consciousness doesn't imply just one, but an infinite number of copies, some just subjected to torture as they are essentially disposable.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#132

Post by Jerrrrrrrry »

bondarchuk wrote: post #86
kakacik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life. I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, dep…

> I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. Some people think identity and the continuity of consciousness are based on information or computation, and not on specific physical matter or soul-like constructs, so for them a transfer of all relevant information would constitute a transfer of consciousness and identity. From this perspective (leaving aside questions of practicality) "you yourself looking…

If you were to slowly replace your brain with a cybernetic appliance, you could also have perfect continuity.

Not that it matters; we sleep and wake up, no one freaks out daily that they were unconscious for hours.

No reason to suspect waking up in 3030 after being unfrozen or in 6045 after being cybernetically reanimated would be any more disconcerting physiologically than an extended coma patients experience.

Your continuity is just as illusionous as your free will.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#133

Post by fragmede »

Jerrrrrrrry wrote: post #132
bondarchuk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. Some people think identity and the continuity of consciousness are based on information or computation, and not on specific physical matter or soul-like constructs, so for them a transfer of all relevant information would constitute a transfer of consciousness and identity. From this perspective (leaving aside questions of practicality) "you yourself looking…

If you were to slowly replace your brain with a cybernetic appliance, you could also have perfect continuity. Not that it matters; we sleep and wake up, no one freaks out daily that they were unconscious for hours. No reason to suspect waking up in 3030 after being unfrozen or in 6045 after being cybernetically reanimated would be any more disconcerting physiologically than an extended coma patients experience. Your…

> no one freaks out daily that they were unconscious for hours.

Speak for yourself! Every time I come to there's something to freak out about. Okay, not every time, but waking up is a lot.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#134

Post by sho_hn »

exe34 wrote: post #108
birdsongs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. ( https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ) What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up. And of course, my original thread of consc…

The worse part is you can't know that your current life isn't one of those. Everything that you think of as perks of being alive could be part of the protocol to keep you cooperative.

Feels like the world religions that doubled down on reincarnation/rebirth/cyclic narratives were, literally, ahead of their time.

Cherish it if the Great RNG In The Sky gave your simulation cycle a good seed.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#136

Post by igorramazanov »

Sharlin wrote: post #92
igorramazanov wrote: post #45

Are we even sure, that personality is stored solely in a brain? What if whole or other parts of body involved as well

As far as we know, damage to no part of the body results in personality changes, changes to subjective sense of self, or the loss of memory or cognitive ability, except the brain.

There are some, not fully verified/researched, personality shifts after heart transplantations. Controversial, and I don't know if anyone tried to run some proper research with psychometrics.

Same goes with fecal transplantations for curing major depressions. Not fully researched either, and not sure if we can say that a depression qualifies as a personality trait.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#137

Post by PowerElectronix »

kakacik wrote: post #39
birdsongs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. ( https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ) What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up. And of course, my original thread of consc…

You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life. I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, dep…

Ahh, but you can't know if it's the actual you that wakes up or a perfect copy of you.

If a copy is indistinguishable enough from the original, you have to treat that copy as you would treat you.

Imagine the following experiment, you are on a room seeing 5 (or 20, or 100) live streams of as many perfect copies. You are informed that a livestream of yourself is being presented to the rest.

You are given the same questions and you all answer in the same way. Now they tell that out of all of you, only one is the original and that you can vote to proceed with some pretty terrible physical punishment to the simulations. Which way are you voting?

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#138

Post by Uncle_Clark »

When I see things like this, it reminds that the saying life imitates art is surprisingly true. This is basically the premise of the movie Transcendence to a certain extent. Very interesting and very cool but begs the question just because we can, does it mean we should?

That being said, ever since I found out about Colossal Bioscience and their de-extinction projects, I have been tuned into their progress with great interest because it is the real life Jurassic Park.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#139

Post by himata4113 »

kakacik wrote: post #39
birdsongs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. ( https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ) What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up. And of course, my original thread of consc…

You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life. I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, dep…

I don't really think you're correct on that one. To begin with, what makes us whole is mostly memories and our subconcious.

What makes it obvious are illnesses like dementia and general decay of neural activity as we get older.

If we implant the same memories into something or someone that person/entity would become you, like waking up from a long nap. You might not feel the same, think the same, or act the same, but it would still feel like you. Going one step further and growing an exact clone can probably go even further than that.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#140

Post by ben_w »

gambiting wrote: post #128
ben_w wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that. I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what j…

It reminds me of this, which talks about this exact scenario: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.

It shouldn't remind you of that, my point is there's little economic use for uploads like this: if thinking meat is cheaper than thinking silicon, train some fresh thinking meat with an electrode array or whatever; if thinking silicon is cheaper, train some fresh thinking silicon.

Non-economic use, that's different of course. Digital afterlife and so on, but as a consumer, not a supplier of anything.

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